5 CHRISTIAN BÖK Aleatory Writing: Notes Toward a Poetics of Chance Borges in The Library of Babel imagines a hellish archive of books a macrocosmic columbarium, whose infinite chambers provide an exhaustive repository for all the permutations and combinations of the alphabet. Inside this endless library (where a single, random volume might consist of nothing but the letters MCV, perversely reiterated on every page), nonsensical texts so drastically outnumber any intelligible books that a coherent phrase, like O time thy pyramids ([1944] 1962:81), must seem tantamount to a wondrous mishap: for one reasonable line [,] there are leagues of insensate cacaphony (81); hence, [t]he impious assert that absurdities are the norm in the Library and that anything reasonable [ ] is an almost miraculous exception (86). Such an allegory inverts the dominant norms of semantic value in order to suggest that meaningful statements constitute only the tiniest, fractional subset of an even greater, linguistic matrix. Such a repressed nightmare already haunts the work of literary scholars, who confront the oppressive totality of literature with the nagging concern that each book might have arisen of its own accord, not from the expressed sentiment of a unique author, but from the automated procedure of a formal system a fatal order, in which even the most unlikely sequence of letters, dhcmrlchtdj (86), might yet convey a message in the form of a portentous cryptogram. ESSAY 5

6 6 ESSAY Borges describes a bibliomanic prisonhouse, where poets can no longer contribute anything innovative to literature because literature itself has already anticipated and inventoried in advance all the anagrammatic combinations of the alphabet, including even the most irrational, most incoherent, cases and even this sublime concept already exists somewhere else, written on another page and spoken by another voice: to speak is to fall into tautologies (86), and the certainty that everything has been already written nullifies or makes phantoms of us all (87). Poets in this imaginary labyrinth become extraneous custodians, who have little choice but to indulge in the recombinant rearranging of letters, excising and splicing the random shards of other textual genomes, doing so in the vain hope that, by an abrupt stroke of luck, literature might speak for itself and thereby vouch for its otherwise absurd existence. Such an allegory almost seems to call attention to the plight of the modern writer, whose enterprises and experiments often resemble the aleatory activity of old men who [ ] hide out in the privies for long periods of time, and, with metal disks in a forbidden dicebox, feebly mimic the divine disorder (84), shuffling letters and symbols, as if in reverent response to the final axiom of Mallarmé: Toute Pensée émet un Coup de Dés (144) All Thought emits a Throw of the Dice.

7 Modern writers from diverse, avant-garde movements (including Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, etc.) have at times imitated the melancholy librarians of Babel, writing poetry by drawing lots or by rolling dice, doing so in order to explore the aesthetic potential of a discourse speaking on behalf of no authorial intention a discourse not for communicating an expressive sensibility, but for generating an unexpected coincidence. Such poetry might include, for example, the poésie découpé of Tristan Tzara and the cadavre exquis of André Breton, the mesostics of John Cage and the asymmetries of Jackson Mac Low, the cut-up novels of William Burroughs and the sadhu muffins of Steve McCaffery. Even though these disparate, aesthetic exercises may stem from a variety of incompatible dispositions, be they nihilist (as is the case for Tzara and Burroughs), buddhist (as is the case for Cage and Mac Low), or leftwing (as is the case for Breton and McCaffery), all of these poets nevertheless suggest that, far from being an autotelic diversion, such writing circumvents the lyrical impulse of subjective expression in order to interrogate our linguistic investment in the poetic values of referentiality and expressiveness, of intentionality and productiveness. Such writing strives to provide an anarchistic alternative to the ideological constraints normally enforced by the capital economy of language. ESSAY 7

8 8 ESSAY Modern writers who deploy an aleatory strategy in their work may appear to do little more than emulate the random excess of irrational liberation, when in fact they confirm that, within language, such random excess is itself a sovereign necessity, an overriding requisite, which reveals the coincidental, if not conspiratory, order of words set free from the need to mean. Such poets accentuate the fact that, even though language may attempt to regulate the ephemeral interplay between the errancy of the arbitrary letter and the grammar of its mandatory syntax, the act of writing nevertheless finds itself traversed, inevitably and invariably, by the entropic dyslalia of chance-driven phenomena (mistakes, blunders, ruptures, hiatuses, glitches, etc.) forces of both semiotic atomization and semantic dissipation, threatening always to relegate language to a dissonant continuum of chaos and noise. Such poets attempt to harness, if not to unleash, these errant forces of paragrammatic recombination, doing so in the hope that chance itself might lead the way automatically to a novel train of thought one otherwise inaccessible to conscious, voluntary intention. Even though literary scholars have often neglected or dismissed this weird genre of writing because of its obdurate, if not hermetic, frivolity, such writing nevertheless formulates an, as yet, unexplored potential within the history of poetics.

9 Baudrillard remarks that [c]hance itself is a special effect; it assumes in imagination the perfection of the accident, and ironically this accidental thing is more meaningful [ ] than intelligible connections ([1983] 1990a, 149). Accidents enchant us far more than any ordinary event that has arisen predictably from an expected cause, and nowhere does this principle seem more compelling than in modern poetry, where [w]ords [ ], when we allow them their free play, [ ] assume the order of destiny (150), becoming all the more oracular when their message seems most unintentionally profound. Aleatory writings of this sort pose, what Breton has called, the problem of objective chance ([1935] 1969, 268) a kind of fortuitous occurrence, whose random nature nevertheless belies mysterious necessities. Breton has argued that poetics must negotiate the problem of this contradiction in language between unintended meanings and deliberate nonsense a problem that the history of poetics has only now begun to analyze: objective chance at this juncture is [ ] the region in which it is most worth our while to carry on our research (268). While Breton expresses this sentiment during the heyday of Surrealism, his call for such systemic research still applies more than ever to modern poetry, written in a chaotic society, defined increasingly by statistical probability and other uncertainty principles. ESSAY 9

10 10 ESSAY Baudrillard remarks that, while quantum physics has corrected an implicit error within deterministic causality, substituting alea for fata, such a science has nevertheless disclosed an even more implicit order behind indeterminate causality a synchronistic order that is itself coincidental and conspiratory: [c]hance [ ] correspond[s] not to a temporary incapacity of science to explain everything [ ] but to the passing from a state of causal determination to another order, radically different, also of non-chance ([1983] 1990a, 145). Baudrillard formulates two hypotheses about randomness: the first, metaphysical (all things, when disjoined, disperse and only by chance do they meet each other); the second, pataphysical (all things, when conjoined, converge and only by chance do they miss each other) (145). Chance fulfills two contradictory duties, since it scatters connected things even as it clusters unrelated things. Where the world disjoins events in order to keep them quarantined from each other, chance serves to force events into a state of mutual collusion, but where the world conjoins events in order to keep them adulterated with each other, chance serves to force events into a state of mutual dispersal. Is chance preserving its power to be intractable by doing both things at once? Is it not fair to say that, wherever a norm prevails, chance seems to intervene on behalf of an anomalous behaviour?

11 Baudrillard remarks that, when we gamble, [c]hance is never neutral, the game transforms it into [ an] agonistic figure ( [1979] 1990b, 143). When we throw the dice, we throw down a gauntlet in the face of chance, doing so in order to defy the transcendence of any random series, thereby forcing chance itself to choose sides, either pro or con, with respect to our fortune. Does such a challenge occur when a poet decides to write according to an aleatory protocol? Does the poet wager that, despite the improbable odds, a randomly composed poem is nevertheless going to be more expressive and more suggestive than any poem composed by wilful intent? Is meaning the stake wagered in this game? If the resultant poem is meaningful, has chance proven itself amiable to the desires of the poet? Or does the poet write with a throw of the dice in order to escape the tyranny of meaning? Is the poet challenging chance to a duel: I dare you to write this meaningful sentence; I dare you to write some marvellous nonsense I dare you to write a poem better than I can. I suspect that, like the gambler, we fully expect to lose such a wager, but nevertheless we hope that events might conspire to surprise us. I suspect that we gamble with meaning in order to seduce the world of signs, currying their favour in the hope that these signs might indemnify our poetic genius by demonstrating that chance itself has already ordained it. ESSAY 11

12 12 ESSAY Baudrillard suggests that we expect order to arise out of chaos in order to resist chaos in what amounts to a desperate conflict, a Sisyphean campaign, waged against an eternal entropy hence, Chance tires God ([1983] 1990a, 147); however, Baudrillard also suggests that, because chance makes tolerable the brutality of fatality, chance is tiresome, not because God must always prevent it, but because God must always produce it, doing so in order to free us from a nightmarish determinism, in which every effect has a primal motive, a causal reason, for which someone, even God, might have to bear the guilt and the blame hence, Chance lets us breathe (147). Chance provides us with a solid alibi, absolving us of any responsibility for the accidents that befall us, even though we might suspect that, at some fatal level, we have somehow willed these disasters into existence. God has nevertheless seen fit to take pity upon us and has let us off the hook for these catastrophes. He has forfeited his duty to account for everything by leaving the task of organizing things to a blind deity randomness itself. Has not the modern writer also begun to suffer from this same kind of godly ennui, refusing to be held accountable for the words upon the page, desiring instead to let these words organize themselves haphazardly? Do we not even now yearn in secret for our own writing to write itself so that we might be free of its taxing labour?

13 Poetry written by chance represents a form of automatic scription that displaces the agency of the author onto a system of impersonal, if not mechanical, procedures, the likes of which call to mind the satiric fantasy of Swift, who imagines a project for improving speculative knowledge by [...] mechanical operations so that even the most ignorant person [...] may write books [...] without the least assistance from genius or study ([1726] 1960:148). Swift describes a framework of wire axles, upon which wood cubes swivel, their numerous facets covered by square pieces of paper with all the words of the language imprinted upon them in all their moods and cases, but without any order, so that anyone turning the handles on the edge of the frame might alter the old sequence of recorded thinking and thus evoke a new locution. Swift describes a kind of mechanical pixelboard that subdivides the blank space of the page into a striated gridwork of cells, each one occupied by its own unique module of chance a lone cube about the bigness of a die (xxx), upon which might depend the poetic fate of a single word. Such a machine synchronizes thousands upon thousands of cast dice in order to orchestrate the manifestation, if not the disappearance, of their broken sentences (150), each word extracted from a grammatical series of coherent points and then implanted into a statistical series of isolated events. ESSAY 13

14 14 ESSAY Swift may lampoon the irrationality of such randomized literature and its mechanized authorship; nevertheless, his satiric fantasy does effectively reconfigure the idea of the page itself, modernizing it, so that the page is no longer a static canvas, but a moving screen a churning, volatile surface, across which the haphazard spectacle of writing finds itself revised and effaced ad infinitum. Swift almost seems to imply that, when science has effectively discredited the romantic paradigm of inspiration, poets have little choice but to take refuge in a new set of aesthetic metaphors for the unconscious, adapting by adopting a machinic attitude, placing the mind on autopilot in order to follow a remote-controlled navigation-system of arbitrary processes. The writer no longer composes a poem in order to transmit a lyrical meaning; instead, the writer launches a stochastic program in order to document a contingent outcome. The writer merely records the lingual fallout from a discharge of random forces otherwise restrained and redirected within language itself; hence, the reader can no longer judge the poem for the stateliness of its expression, but must rather judge the work for the uncanniness of its production. No longer can the reader ask: How expressive or how persuasive is this composition? instead, the reader must ask: How surprising or how disturbing is this coincidence?

15 Poetry written by chance disintegrates language, pulverizing it, discharging the resultant particles into a void of indeterminate probabilities a noisy abyss where letters and symbols might collide or disband at random, doing so in a manner reminiscent of the clinamen described by Lucretius, who draws an analogy between atoms and words in order to suggest that all substances and all utterances result from the anagrammatic permutations of infinitesimal nuclei ([50 B.C.] 1975, 175): while the first bodies are being carried downwards by their own weight in a straight line through the void [ ], they swerve a little from their course ( [50 B.C.] 1975, 113), for without this little swerve, this clinamen, all particles must invariably fall vertically, like miniscule raindrops, never interacting with each other in order to form aggregate compounds. The clinamen involves a Brownian kinetics, whose descent defies the truisms of inertia since such a swerve entails a change in vector without a change in force. The clinamen represents the minimal obliquity within a laminar trajectory. The swerve is a tangent to a descent, but a tangent that defies all calculus since the swerve is itself composed of infinite tangents. The clinamen thus describes the volute rhythm of a fractal contour. The myriad veers and sundry bends of such a downfall graph the smallest possible aberration that can make the greatest potential difference. ESSAY 15

16 16 ESSAY Kristeva remarks that, within such an aleatory paradigm, letters become assemblages of signifying, [ ] scriptural atoms, flying from word to word, creating in this way unsuspected and unconscious connections among the elements of discourse ([1969] 1989, 124). Letters no longer remain gridlocked in the striated space of their lineated pages; instead, they flit and dart within a smoother space of volatile links that spiral outward from any starting point, turning the text into an agitated ensemble of accidental, but nevertheless ubiquitous, paratexts (be they anagrams, acrostics, or homophones, charades, lipograms, or cryptonyms, etc.). Such aleatory wordplay does not simply interfere with semantic cohesion, but may in fact afford another genre of truth its own chance to reveal itself, for what appears to be a disruptive misprision in one act of reading may in fact be a fortuitous disclosure of an otherwise hidden secret. The clinamen simply facilitates these lexical changes of fortune, transforming unlucky detours into serendipitous opportunities for unanticipated signification. The clinamen simply transmutes each letter into a fugitive particle that might accidentally, if not capriciously, appear, change, or vanish, during its relentless flow through the imperial aqueduct of grammar. The atomic letter thus threatens at every turn to introduce a sublimated turbulence into its own stream of grammatical imperatives.

17 Baudrillard remarks that [a]ll these formulas converge on the idea of a Brownian stage of language, an emulsional stage of the signifier, homologous to the molecular stage of physical matter, that liberates harmonies of meaning just as fission or fusion liberates new molecular affinities ([1976] 1993a, 218). Brownian theories of lettrisme presume that, just as a very complex, highly regulated, atomic organization might emerge spontaneously from a random matrix of even simpler, highly localized, atomic interactions, so also might meaningful expression emerge from a random subset of anagrammatic combinations based, for example, upon the frequency of alphabetical distribution in any subset of letters for a specific language (be they bigrams, trigrams, tetragrams, etc.). Mathetic theories of information (as seen, for example, in the work of Shannon) demonstrate how sensible messages might emerge spontaneously from a Markov chain of transitionary probabilities a chain in which the stochastic likelihood of one letter following another serial subset of letters determines the sequential appearance of these letters in a random series ([1949] 1963, 45). Such probabilities establish the level of redundancy in a message, permitting us to determine the most likely series of letters when some of them have been altered or omitted due to the entropic deviance of a clinamen in the course of transmission. ESSAY 17

18 18 ESSAY Shannon explains the stochastic procedures of such Markov chains by imagining a game of vagrant perusal: [O]ne opens a book at random and selects a letter at random on the page. This letter is recorded. The book is then opened to another page and one reads until this letter is encountered. The succeeding letter is then recorded. [One turns] to another page [where] this second letter is searched for and the succeeding letter recorded, etc. ([1949] 1963, 44). Shannon sets out demonstrate that, as a larger number of antecedent letters affect the stochastic occurrence of a subsequent letter, the resultant series, although aleatory, does nevertheless approach an asymptote of intelligibility reminiscent of a language (43). Hartman, for example, has used a computer to generate Markov chains based upon the frequency of trigrams found in Ecclesiastes, yielding: A wisdot sloth, and forength him then rings. For of to ing is man s whildigninch (1996, 56). Shannon has calculated that, because of these transitionary probabilities, which characterize any serial subset of letters in English, only about 50% of the letters in any series are redundant which is to say that any person writing in English can voluntarily choose no more than half of the available letters in a text since all of the remaining letters find themselves governed entirely by the statistical constraints of the language itself ([1949] 1963, 56). Baudrillard suggests that [w]riting[,] [w]hether poetry or theory, [is] nothing but the projection of an

19 arbitrary code [ ] (an invention of the rules of a game) where things come to be taken in their fatal development ( [1983] 1990a, 154). Writing by means of an aleatory protocol almost fulfills the dream of Deleuze, who imagines an ideal game of chance, one whose rules are themselves subject repeatedly to chance, resulting in an aimless outcome so futile that we have no choice but to dismiss the game as a nonsensical dissipation of time itself (an atelic, if not asemic, activity, not unlike the speculative daydreaming that might take place, for example, in poetry and theory): only thought finds it possible to affirm all chance for [i]f one tries to play this game other than in thought, nothing happens, and if one tries to produce a result other than the work of art, nothing is produced ([1969] 1990, 60); hence, [t]his game, which can only exist in thought and which has no other result than the work of art is also that by which thought and art [ ] disturb [ ] reality (60), disrupting, with every throw of the dice, our own fiscal demand for excess values, like meaning and purpose. Only the artisan and the thinker can play this game because, in it, there is nothing but victories for those who know how [...] to affirm and ramify chance, instead of dividing it in order to dominate it, in order to wager, in order to win (60). ESSAY 19

20 20 ESSAY Bloom suggests that, within such an aleatory paradigm, antecedent norms no longer inhibit subsequent forms since the clinamen stems always from a pataphysical sense of the arbitrary the equal haphazardness of cause and effect (1973, 42). The clinamen intervenes in the historical trajectory of all influences, including even the causal cycles that prevail between young writers and their older mentors. The avant-garde has so far bet its future upon the clinamen in the hope that such a swerve might lead poetry away from rules of imitation (and the decline of their masters) into games of agitation (and the ecstasy of their players). One may write by chance in order to be amazed perhaps by what the dice have to say for themselves. The outrage expressed by academics when faced with the work of the aleatory writer almost mimics the outrage expressed by moralists when faced with the vice of the gambling addict. The critics who balk at such poetry refuse to take a chance, even though they speculate on literary legacies, trading in them like shares on a stock index in the casino of aesthetic tradition. Do not critics place a wager on a poet, hoping that posterity might celebrate the pedagogical clairvoyance of the first critic to herald the talent of a young genius? Do not critics play a game of astragalomancy, like a crapshoot, whose outcome remains, in foresight, uncertain, but in hindsight, necessary?

21 Aleatory writing almost evokes the mystique of an oracular ceremony, but one in which the curious diviner cannot pose any queries, except perhaps for the kind imagined by Roussel in Locus Solus, where he describes a fortuneteller, who spins a die inscribed with three phrases: l ai-je eu? (did I have it?), l ai-je (do I have it?), and l aurai-je (will I have it?) ([1914] 1963, 293). Roussel derives this prophetic die from the word déluge, which he fragments into dé (meaning die ) and l eusje (meaning did I have it? ). Roussel thereby deduces an uncanny coincidence in language between the laws that govern both the rising flood and the gaming table. When we write, using an aleatory protocol do we not probe the status of our talent, asking the dice whether or not we still have it, the genius to push our luck, in order to produce a major effect from a minor cause? Do we not exaggerate our insignificance as poets so that, despite our own innocuousness, our sneezes might yet set in motion a series of events, resulting in a cyclone. If my thoughts meander, jumping, as if at random, from topic to topic, I have perhaps let them do so in order to follow the clinamen of a peripatetic speculation, taking a chance, putting thought itself at risk in the hope that, like Cage, I might use [a]narchy [ ] to explore a way of writing which, though coming from ideas, is not about them, or is not about ideas, but produces them (1990, 2). ESSAY 21

23 JULIANA SPAHR Fra Unevenness Flora and fauna appear without annotation. Humans add their annotation, cataloguing the flora and fauna, dividing them up, charting their connections and variations and as they do this they read into them their own stories. Jacomo Bosio in 1609 looked at the passiflora, the passion flower, and saw within the flower the crucifixion. He saw the five wounds of Christ, a crown of thorns, the cords that bound the body to the cross, the goblet of the Last Supper, the doubters. He saw his story, a story of Christ in a new world vine. The passiflora did not show up in the island in the middle of the Pacific where this story, a story of them, takes place until the late nineteenth century. But passiflora gets busy once it arrives. It grows towards the light and its leaves unfold like solar panels pointing towards the sun and then it begins to smoother and break underlying vegetation with dense mats of stems and foliage. The people who live on this island in the Pacific in the late nineteenth century do not see the story of Christ, or perhaps they do but it does not interest them. They called what Bosio called the passiflora huehue haole. Huehue is the name of a climber native to the islands. Haole is the word that is used to describe the them in this story, people who arrive from somewhere else. In the world of plants it is also used to describe a particularly noxious and invasive species. ESSAY 23 This is a story of the passiflora and the tree canopy. It is a story of three who moved to an island in the middle of the Pacific. It begins eight years ago when they all get on the airplane to go to the island. In the plane, two sat in one row of two seats and one sat in a row ahead of the other two. The one who sat in a row ahead talked with another person in the same row who had lived on an atoll for a number of years but now the atoll was gone because the ocean had risen above it. Together the three of them and the stranger who had lived on the atoll first saw the island in the middle of

24 the Pacific that would be their home through the plane window. It was a mixture of green and of concrete and it was surrounded by water that was a deep blue. Out the window of the airplane, it looked like everything that they were told that a tropical island might be. They had left behind them a very cold place and they had arrived at a very warm, lush place. The place to which they moved was one island among 132 in the earth s longest island chain. Their arrival to this island had histories. But their histories were small, were nothing, compared to the history of the island. When they first landed they went from an airplane into a car and they went from a car into an empty apartment and then went from an empty apartment into a bar where they had beers in the afternoon. They were awkward because they got off the airplane on an island. They were awkward with their bodies in the five hour time difference after a ten hour flight. They were awkward because they had never lived together before. 24 ESSAY For a long time everything felt like airplanes to them. Like moving between. Like migration. Like motion. Not the way they imagined migration felt like to plovers or monarchs or whales or garden snakes or ants or slugs or any of the herds of walking animals that move with what they imagined was an inner smoothness, an instinct, a nameless desire that propelled a forward motion from one place to another. Instead they felt uprooted and tense around the shoulders and dry in the mouth and also full of tiredness and boredom. They felt like they were still breathing stale air and sitting in awkward seats. They felt like sudden drops in altitude and turbulence might happen at any moment but that if they just held on and relaxed it would most likely be ok. They were newcomers to the island but they were at the same time part of a long history of arrival to the island. The island was contested land. It had a history of overthrow and occupation by those who like them arrived from the continent. Those who like them had arrived from the continent many years ago set up their own form

25 of government, an inefficient and unfair one, and had done things like outlawed certain forms of dance and the language that was spoken on the island before those from the continent had arrived. Although this had happened many years ago it was still a history that was fresh, that was remembered by everyone on the islands. They were a part of this history of occupation because of where they were born and it remained with them and was inescapable in most daily interactions. They had no choice in how they were seen as occupiers. It was with them in line at the grocery store and while waiting for the light to change at the intersection. It was with them when they walked down the streets and when they met people in a bar. All around them were reminders of what they were and of their impact. They lived among plants that grew into each other in various and unique ways. There was not only the huehue haole which smothered shrubs, small trees, and the ground layer. But there was the koa haole which formed dense thickets and excluded all other plants. And the kamani-haole and the wiliwili haole and the laua e-haole. Most of the birds they saw around them came from other places and took over. The myna was introduced in 1865 to control army worms. The sparrow was introduced in The Japanese white eye was introduced in The red-billed Leiothrix probably escaped from a cage in As the birds changed, the plants changed with them from native to largely alien because the birds carried seeds in their feathers and in their waste. There was an indigenous bird, the kolea, that summered on the continent and wintered on the island. It was often called the haole bird because it came to the island, got fat, and then returned to the continent. This history swooped down and then took away what they thought they were and replaced it with a weak complicity with power that they didn t like about themselves but had to accept even as they tried to speak out against it in their tiny ineffectual voices. ESSAY 25 When they first arrived, that the place was colonized unnerved them. At first they thought they never wanted to live in a place that was colonized. Then they began to realize that it was hard to find a place that had not been colonized by someone at

26 26 ESSAY some time. So then they decided that they did not want to live in a place that was recently colonized. Or a place that identified as colonized. But after they lived in this colonized place for a while, they became obsessed with other colonized places. They became colonialism groupies. They read colonial and postcolonial novels avidly. They searched out Senegalese films, mailing away for them from distribution centers on the continent. They listened to dancehall and reggae music. They looked at clogging in a new light. They read history, sociology, botany, literary criticism. As long as it was about how one people dominated another people, it felt relevant to their lives. Books that they had been made to read in graduate school and had found irrelevant to their thinking about avant garde poetry suddenly felt crucial. A friend would talk about her mother s schizophrenia and refer to Fanon and it would feel real and make sense in a way that it would not have five years earlier. They began to think they might now understand a friend they had had hung out with when they lived in South Korea for a year who had one Korea stickers on his moped and his notebook and his cellphone but who was always saying that he hated North Korea because it had no discos. At the end of the Senegalese film Faat Kine when Kine s son makes a speech about tradition being respectful of women, they felt a small thrill that nationalism could be progressive even though they did not understand the politics of Senegal and they felt nervous about relating too strongly to nationalisms from places they knew little about even as they knew this nervousness was part of the problem, part of the reason it was so hard to make things better. This same thrill took the form of goosebumps at local protests. And certain songs and chants on the radio would also give them chills, especially ones of regaining the land. This chill they thought was probably about the sudden possibility of escape from large systemic limitations. They too were trying to escape from large systems, from limitations on relation, which is probably why these moments that had no direct relation to their lives felt so thrilling. Once they were on the island they had no words for themselves. They

27 had only theories. And the words they thought they might use did not work. They did not know what to make of how it felt reassuring to watch on public television the female hedge sparrow vigorously shaking her tail feathers at two different male birds to indicate her desire to be inseminated by each of them in close succession or to watch a cable channel s documentary on the marrying tribe of the Amazon or to watch the music channel s soap opera subplot of a girl and her agreement with two guys which involved neither of them having sex with her independently but was of course immediately broken by two of them when the third went off to study. The interest they felt in these images that came at them without their input made them feel stupid but they could find few models to turn to among their friends so they could not stop thinking about these models made for them by other people far away from them. Lack of understanding was all around. It defined them. They could not understand the marrying tribe. They did not even know the real name of the marrying tribe, the name that the members of the tribe had chosen to call themselves. The documentary neglected to provide this information. After they spent some time on the island in the middle of the Pacific, they found themselves thinking hard about how to negotiate things, about analogy, about the word we, about how to be in a place that was so not for them. There were all sorts of pressures around writing and the island. And the pressure came from all over. When they had first decided to move to the island, a friend had said to them that he hoped that they were not going to turn into this other woman, a woman who like them had come to the island from the continent and now worked hard to write about and publish the work of writers of the island. But that sort of snide pressure not to write about the island was nothing next to what was said at times by those who had geneological ties to the island from before whaling ships arrived. It was clear to them that there was such a long tradition of appropriation that anything they might say they would have to say sideways. The island had played a large role in the literary and filmic imaginaries of their culture. In this imaginary, the island ESSAY 27

28 was a welcoming multicultural paradise filled with beautiful young women and wise old people who did not ask for much and shared their land and food and culture and even welcomed their colonizers as civilizers. These were stories the colonizers told to tell how they were welcomed. They did not want to write things like this. But the other response that they saw when they looked around them, the response of many like them from the continent, was to ignore the island and build a bunker. This did not feel right either. As there were no right answers, there were also no easy answers. They distrusted any that they were given. 28 ESSAY At moments this complication made them feel optimistic and vaguely excited. It was like the sun in this place. The sun was bright and stimulating. It was an antioxidant and produced melanin in their skin that in turn blocked ultraviolet rays. It felt good to be out in the sun and they liked to feel the sun heating up their skin, feel its stimulation, feel it causing some sort of chemical reaction that relaxed their muscles, their brain, and then filled them with small feelings of mild euphoria. And their feeling that they might some day figure things out if they kept thinking about things with generosity and an open mind and heart was to them an antioxidant and a protectant and yet another small feeling of mild euphoria. But they also knew that because they were from afar and because their relatives were from afar they could not stay too long in the sun thinking and trying to figure things out no matter if they did it with generosity or with anger as the rays would injure their blood vessels and swelling and reddening would result. They kept thinking what they might use to allow them to be out in the sun and yet not get burnt. And so they developed a series of rules about their dealings with the island. They were not sure their rules were right, but they felt nonetheless that they had to come up with some rules and act as if they were right, try them out as it were, so they could keep thinking about the island. This thinking about the rules felt like it might protect them in the sun, felt better than the other option which was to bunker down in the shade and be done with the thinking.

29 Before they made their rules, they looked around them at other people s rules. One person they knew who like them was from afar but who studied the language of the island and who was tattooed in the tattoos of the island and who was tanned so that he looked as if he was from the island was constantly talking about how one should always say that one was not from the island. This constant declaration of not being from the island felt less necessary to them because they never managed to look like they were from the island no matter how hard they tried, no matter what they wore. They did not tan darkly and the more tan they got the lighter their hair got and so no amount of tattoos could fool anyone into thinking they were from the island. They were fascinated by how he worked so hard to look like he was from the island and then worked so hard to make sure everyone knew he was not from the island. They were interested in how despite his years of study of the language of the island, he felt that what should be translated and what should be kept close to the culture and not allowed out into the larger world through translation was not a decision he could or should make. They knew another person also from afar who refused to teach creative writing at the university even though he had published a number of books because he felt that the writing written in the island had to deal with the unique issues of the island and that the people who had genealogical ties to the island from before the whaling ships arrived should be the ones teaching how to write this writing. Another person also from afar felt that her work had to begin by listing all its debts to the thinkers who had genealogical ties to the island from before the whaling ships arrived. ESSAY 29 Other people seemed to have no rules. They knew several people who were like them from afar but who wrote novels that were set in the island that had characters that were from the island and who when they read their novels presented themselves as from the island or as representing the people of the island. So one person they knew who was originally from the continent but had grown up on military bases on various islands was presented as the first novelist of the islands by his publisher.

30 They could not imagine that he thought of himself this way. Yet he was cavalier about his identity. He did not claim much but neither did he disclaim and so his identity slid around a lot and he got prizes for being an island novelist in contests on the continent and he showed up and accepted them. Another writer who had lived on the island for many years was presented by his publisher as writing the first great novel of the island, the first novel to really capture the island. There was much talk about the novel, especially what would be or could be or might be the first novel of the island. Or the first novel to really capture the island. Or the first novel to really capture the island written by someone who had genealogical ties to the island from before the whaling ships arrived. Or the first novel to really capture the island written by someone who had genealogical ties to the island from before the whaling ships arrived and who also stayed on the island to write. 30 ESSAY Or the first novel to really capture the island written by someone who had genealogical ties to the island from before the whaling ships arrived and who also stayed on the island to write and who published a novel with an island press. Or the first novel to really capture the island written by someone who had genealogical ties to the island from before the whaling ships arrived and who also stayed on the island to write and who published a novel with an island press and who wrote a novel that was a rousing call to arms for the end of the colonial occupation of the island.

31 This talk fascinated them because the novel had arrived like them, from afar. It had arrived on the whaling ships. And for years the novel of the island was presented as written entirely by people from afar. There were some now who had genealogical ties to the island from before the whaling ships arrived who wrote the novel, but because the novel had such a machine of production around it these novels tended to be marketed to the audience on the continent and many people who lived on the island did not see these novels as part of their tradition. And there was some discussion about whether the island even needed a novel by someone with genealogical ties to the island before whaling ships arrived or not. The culture had done so well without the novel, why would it want it? Because they were writers they thought a lot about how they were glad they did not write novels. But they knew also that just because they wrote poetry, a genre that had a long history on the island before the whaling ships arrived, they did not get off having to think about what it meant to be a writer in the island. So at some point they came up with a series of rules. Their rules went like this Whenever they discussed the island, they had the responsibility to address the legacy of colonialism in the island. They could never pretend that it did not shape their every sentence, their use of every word, their every comma, and their every period. They could not pretend that they were innocent of it, that they did not benefit from it all the time. They felt that any work that they did about the island should somehow make clear that it was against colonialism. But at the same time this work should also make clear that they were not the only person who had ever thought up anticolonialism. They had to both point out that they supported the sovereignty movement and that this movement was larger than them and that while they supported the movement they were not its spokesperson and were not a major or crucial part of this movement. And they felt that they should never suggest in their work that they knew what form of government the people who had genealogical ties to the island from before the whaling ships arrived should use but they also felt that they should suggest as often ESSAY 31

32 as possible that the island should be governed by those who had genealogical ties to the island from before the whaling ships arrived. They also felt they should not claim to understand the culture that was there before the whaling ships arrived. And if they were for some reason going to write something set in the past, they should not set any of their work in the time before the whaling ships arrived. And they felt they should make clear in their work that they were in dialogue with other writers from the island, that they were not the only writer from the island, or even the writer to read when one wanted to read about the island. They felt they had to make clear when talking to people that their perspective on the island was just one among many and an incomplete one that they arrived at only by thinking with others who had genealogical ties to the island from before the whaling ships arrived and others who were born on the island but had families and heritages from afar. So they wrote no poems about how beautiful the bougainvillea was without also mentioning how the plant was probably brought to the island in 1827 by Father Bachelot, the first catholic missionary to the island. And during this time whenever they had to submit a biographical note to go with some publication they always wrote that they were a continential haole so as to make clear that they did not have a genealogical ties to the island before the whaling ships arrived but the editors of the publications on the continent kept editing out this information. 32 ESSAY They did not think that their rules should be everyone else s rules or that other people had to sign on to them. They did not nail them to any door. And they made it a point not to complain about other people s differing rules. They respected the decision of their friend not to teach creative writing even though they felt that creative writing at the university could not change unless people like him taught it and then reformed it from the inside out. It for sure wasn t going to change on its own. They let their rules evolve and change over time. At some moments letting themselves mention the bougainvillea as if it was innocent or perhaps skirting into dangerous territory by using the names of the animals and plants mentioned in a

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